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Episcopal Tour of Dominican Republic Highlights Church's Plans for Growth

Episcopal News Service. April 19, 1996 [96-1448]

Nan Cobbey, Features Editor for Episcopal Life

(ENS) Purple balloons crackled as they flipped in the wind and small girls, festive in hair ribbons and petticoats, twirled in place as the procession set off.

A 10-foot banner tied in the tree limbs announced the celebration to the neighbors. The tiny congregation of San Felipe Apostol (St. Philip), founded 12 years earlier in the living room of Maria Nova in Block R#4 of Sabana Perdida in the Dominican Republic, was today burying a time capsule and breaking ground for a new sanctuary. The church's members hoped their descendants would find the capsule one day when next the church rebuilt.

Bishop Julio C. Holguin, the diocesan bishop, had come and he had brought visitors with him -- Presiding Bishop Edmond Browning; his wife, Patti; House of Deputies President Pamela Chinnis; and Anglican and Global Affairs officer Ricardo Potter, a native of the Dominican Republic.

As the delegation learned during their three-day visit in March, Holguin has ambitious plans. St. Philip's and its new sanctuary funded by the United Thank Offering (UTO) is one of many success stories in this barely 100-year-old diocese.

"We believe we can establish 20 new missions in the next few years," said Holquin, who has been establishing up to five per year since his consecration in 1991. "We put a strong emphasis on tithing... and establishing schools which provide support for the diocese."

A model of expansion

With pride, the bishop told his visitors, "The church has assumed the vision of responsibility for its future." He explained that in 1990, the year before he became bishop, the diocese was "85 percent dependent on mother church" and only one of its congregations was able to pay the salary of its priest. Last year, eight to 10 of the 50-plus churches paid their priests' salaries and the diocese only needed 70 percent of its budget subsidized.

"We have been trying to break the model of the maintenance church," said Holguin. "Now we have to focus on a model of expansion."

Much of that expansion will be aided by Volunteer for Mission Bob Stevens, former associate director of Habitat for Humanity in Latin America. Stevens, who has spent his career working in planning and development, has mapped out where and how the church should expand, targeting areas of rapid population growth along highways and in the cities.

"One and a half million people are not anywhere near an Episcopal Church," he told Browning and his delegation. "We need to rectify that. As we develop in middle class areas, they could help support the church."

Most Episcopal churches now are in the poorest neighborhoods and many do not yet have sanctuaries. "They meet in carports, living rooms and rented rooms," said Stevens, who envisions building a series of two-story structures with sanctuaries on the first floor, parish halls on the second.

The Rev. Edmundo DeSueza, diocesan chancellor and executive secretary for the new province forming in the Caribbean region, shares many of Stevens' goals, especially about attracting more middle class members who will help support ministry goals. But DeSueza focuses particularly on the social role of the church in this country where, according to diocesan publications, only 10 to 15 percent of the population is active in any church.

"We have in the city of Santo Domingo 15 universities, six government supported institutions... 300,000 students, yet we do not have chaplaincy work with any of them," said DeSueza. He recommends that the church start that work by helping students find loans and scholarships, counsel them about spiritual orientation and teach them the importance of "spending part of their time in community service."

DeSueza, Holguin and Stevens are adept at analyzing the country's social and economic problems, which include 9 percent inflation, 26 percent unemployment, declining production, a growing inability to compete in the world market, and governmental corruption at all levels.

"More than half the people live below the poverty level," says Holguin, and "400,000 to 500,000 children do not get schooling every year."

"Tourism brings in hard currency, dollars," says Stevens, "but it really creates social problems."

One of those problems is child prostitution, which DeSueza believes involves 2,000 boys and girls in the capital city and more in the tourist resort areas of Boca Chica, La Romana and Puerto Plata. He wants to see the church addressing more of the social ills facing the country.

Trip shows challenges facing church

Browning, Chinnis and the others saw some of the problems and much of the church in three days. They visited San Pedro de Macoris, a port town on the river Higuamo 50 miles from the capital, home to sugar processing and 160,000 people. The Episcopal Church began here, in the 1890s, in a community of West Indian immigrants who had come to work in the sugar industry.

In this eastern region, the delegation also visited several congregations and a health and nutrition center run by the Sisters of the Transfiguration, an Episcopal order based in Cincinnati, Ohio. In the entry of the center, the delegation paused at a bulletin board of before and after pictures of children "saved" by the sisters. Babies with birth defects, toddlers emaciated by malnutrition -- all had been cured or helped by the center or by generous friends of the sisters who had provided operations and care in U.S. hospitals.

In Consuelo, a town that grew up around a sugar mill, Browning and Chinnis addressed a small congregation that had been waiting two hours to see them in a unusual semi-circular church painted red, yellow and aqua. At Batey Gautier, a sugar plantation's housing area, the group greeted several hundred Haitian cane cutters and their families in a still-under-construction, tin-roofed church built in part with UTO funds.

In a series of visits to congregations in Santa Domingo, a meeting with the Roman Catholic papal nuncio, interviews with the press and conversations with the Episcopal Church Women, Browning stressed the importance of commitment to the poor, as well as his concern about the growing lack of confidence in authority and lack of cohesive community that he saw in his own country. He encouraged the growth and commitment he saw evidenced during his visit.

"What I find impressive here is [the church's] holistic mission. It is ambitious, but it is a vision that carries a great deal of excitement and energy," said Browning. Chinnis agreed. "So much of the long-range planning we hear is sort of pie-in-the-sky," she told church officials. "I'm impressed with the systematic way you've gone about it."

At a Eucharist in St. Andrew's Church that brought priests and lay leaders from around the diocese, Browning again praised the diocese and its bishop for their dedication and "great determination."

"To be an autonomous church is to have a voice," he said, "to represent yourself among equals. We support you in all of this."

[thumbnail: Browning Heads Delegation...]